Why alienating developers is a winning strategy

I'd disagree with the author. iPhone won't see very many large, high-risk applications developed as a result of Apple's approach. Apple screws over developers and partners too often. You will build a $1 application in a few man-months for iPhone, no questions.<p>Build a Google Voice? Build a Flash-&#62;iPhone compiler? You might get screwed and lose a really big wad of cash.<p>When business types decide what to build, they multiply out risks. You have technical risk (developers can't build it), market risk (people won't buy it), and a bunch of others. Typically, they're individually low-risk (say, 80% chance of success), but when you multiply them together, you get pretty low numbers.<p>If you toss in the additional risk of "Apple will cut me off if I'm successful and they want to compete with me" and "Apple will cut me off if they don't like me," it makes it a much less compelling platform.<p>The costs also go up if you can't share codebase. Requiring iPhone SDK is sort of sane -- you make an iPhone-specific front-end, and it looks better. Requiring Objective C or one of their other languages is kinda wacko -- you can't even share back-end logic. If I just spent millions on something complex (image processing engine, voice recognition system, or whatever), I don't want to spend another big portion of that for an iPhone port.<p>Worse, the same applies to custom business software, but even more so. If I have an enterprise app employees must use (think UPS guy or bus driver or anything like that), I care a lot about development time, not much about usability, and I can dictate platforms. If I can recompile to Android but rewrite for iPhone, guess what I'm gonna do?

The author has entirely missed the reasons for Apple's successes and failures.<p>I was a Mac guy in the '90s. The Macs of the day were uninspired beige boxes. They were also expensive and used connectivity technology that made peripherals more expensive[0].<p>The OS also sucked. The UI was nice, but from a technical standpoint, NT4 was easily and clearly superior[1]. Even Windows 95 had better memory management and multitasking.<p>Everything Apple made from about 1988 to 1998 would have gotten the Steve Jobs "This is shit!" stamp. Apple lost ground in the '90s because it made average products and sold them at premium prices; it had little to do with third-party developers.<p>The success of the iPhone also had little to do with third-party developers. It simply has the best user experience, and a "wow-factor" that makes people want to buy one when they play with it. The iPhone would be the most popular smartphone even if it had no third-party apps at all; most people by the iPhone for the iPhone, not the apps.<p>[0] Not inherently, in many cases, but the result was less competition between peripheral makers than on the PC side.<p>[1] It pains me to say this. I've always hated Windows.

Author misses one important point - Apple doesn't need the goodwill now with a big winner on its hands, but it might need the goodwill later if they're in a competitive race in a new market. And all things being equal, I think developers would choose "the other side" if the quality/market size was close.<p>These sorts of short term capricious mandates don't always come back to bite a major player, but sometimes they do. It might bite Apple later, or might not. That article was a really fun read though, I do like his style and tone.